What We Did With the Garbage After Everything Died
Lead-in:
Someone pinned this to what's left of the Texaco sign off I-75. Then it showed up in Biloxi, then Homestead. Different handwriting each time. Shaky like whoever copied it was drunk. Probably were.
---
The first art arrives before we do—FEMA tarps. Blue, silver, green, brown. Some asshole in Washington picked these colors.
We gather what came back. A kid's necklace strangling a stop sign. Wood that smells like someone's last breakfast—bacon, normal Sunday, before. Microwave doors everywhere. Just doors. No microwaves. I don't—physics doesn't—whatever.
Jeremy's grandmother's wig was in a tree. He laughed till he puked. Made something from it because what else. What else do you do with that.
We name the pieces after storms but that's stupid. Everything's stupid. This is Katrina. That's Michael. That's Maria giving you the finger.
Rodriguez found the worst thing yesterday. A foreclosure notice. Still taped to a door. Just a door. No house. The notice was laminated. Someone laminated their—I can't. I can't think about that.
This kid runs around screaming "Huracán! Huracán!" His mom's probably—yeah. We gave him spray paint. I don't know why. He draws circles. Spirals. Says the storm taught him but he's seven so.
The weather station. Still broadcasting numbers. Barometric pressure while we're sleeping in cars.
A Bentley floated by. Mozart playing. Heated seats on. September. Florida. There's a body fifty feet away, three days dead. The seats. Were still. Heating.
Someone's dollhouse in sewage. Perfect little furniture drowning in actual shit.
Get a grip. Can't grip. Everything's wet.
We photograph things. For insurance that won't pay. For FEMA that won't come. For proof we were here before we were "victims."
Linda. In her doorframe. No door. No house. Just frame. Holding her son's baby teeth in a bag. "These survived," she says. Says. Says. Her son's thirty. Lives in Denver. Hasn't called.
The rescue workers aren't rescuing anymore. Different paperwork now. Marcus tore apart a kitchen looking for Mrs. Chen. Found a Big Mouth Billy Bass. "Take Me to the River." Still singing. Marcus laughed. Or cried. Looks the same.
Water lines on walls. Four feet. Six feet. You're-dead feet.
Sarah planted tomatoes where her bed was. Waters them with $4 Dasani because capitalism loves this shit. They're growing through her mattress springs. Everything's water. We're water. The storm was water. There's probably a—I'm too tired for metaphors.
Rodriguez welded a palm tree from shopping carts. "Won't blow down next time." There's always a next time now.
That disco ball from the Baptist church—we hung it up and danced for twenty minutes before remembering we're in hell. CNN filmed us. We looked—yeah.
"Touch some—" Marina's drunk. Day drunk. "Lick it if it won't—" She licked a stop sign. Said it tasted like pennies.
Dawn's just emergency lights now. They never turn them off.
This finance guy shows up. Says he was scuba diving when—probably lying. Everyone's lying. Or not. Who cares. He makes art now. It sucks. We include it.
The Huracán kid teaches us spirals with his fingers. In mud. Says the storm's still here, invisible, still spinning. Kids know things. Or he's brain-damaged. Both maybe.
Government woman taking water samples. "Unsafe levels." Everything's unsafe levels. The water. The soil. The relationships between people with nothing and people with less.
We make things because—because making is the opposite of breaking? Even ugly things. Especially ugly things. Garbage tied to garbage.
My house was yellow. Maple Street. Where I was born. It's in seventeen pieces now, seventeen different—people wearing my childhood and they don't know.
Sarah's tomatoes are huge. Mutant huge. Chemical huge. We'll eat them. Call them "disaster fruit." Rich people will buy them. Rich people buy anything if you make suffering sound special.
This is history. Now. We're tomorrow's documentary. "Remember when people lived in Florida?"
But today we're here. Still here. Making things from unmade things. The kid stopped screaming "Huracán." Whispers it now. Constantly. Like it's the only word left.
Wait. I forgot something. There was this—on Maple Street—the yellow house where—
No. I said that already.
Rodriguez is crying about the shopping cart palm tree. Says it's stupid. We tell him it's not. It is. But we tell him it's not.
Linda's teeth in the bag—her son's baby teeth—she counts them. Twenty. Counts them again. Twenty. Again.
The finance guy's gone. Or he's here. I can't track everyone.
We're making—what are we making? Garbage art? Disaster souvenirs? Therapy? I don't—
"Just keep making things," Marina says. Still drunk. Always drunk now. "Make things till you can't."
---
Coda:
Pin this wherever. Or don't. We turned trash into something because trash was all we had. That's not profound. That's just what happened. What's still happening. What happens when everything breaks and you're too stubborn to stop making things, even if the things you make don't make sense to anyone, including yourself.
